1. ABSTRACT
University of Manchester
Nanci Hogan
Masters of Philosophy
Title: The implications of a politics of natality for the praxis of peacebuilding in
the Middle East
June 9, 2013
This thesis sketches out the contours of a politics of natality suggested by the
work of feminist philosopher of religion, Grace Jantzen, based on her reading of
Hannah Arendt’s work on natality. It takes up Jantzen’s suggestion that a moral
imaginary that privileges birth makes human flourishing the central goal of
politics. Based on ethical implications of making flourishing central to politics, I
develop a framework, the matrices of flourishing, for investigating peacebuilding
in the Israel/Palestine conflict in order to uncover the fluid moral and ethical
actions and identities of those engaged in peacebuilding, something the thesis
argues is not sufficiently addressed by approaches which do not privilege
natality. It then tests this feminist research methodology by investigating the
stories of Israelis and Palestinians engaged in a wide range of peacebuilding
approaches in order to locate aspects of flourishing. I travelled to Israel and
Palestine in 2008 and using a semi-structured narrative inquiry approach I
interviewed 32 secular and religious men and women engaged in conflict
transformation and peacebuilding activities. The data revealed that fragile rays
of hope, solidarities, were emerging that transcended national, religious and
gendered boundaries, which opened up possible fluid futures. Consequently,
this thesis makes recommendations for peacebuilding systems approaches and
outlines a research agenda using this approach to assist with strategic planning
for future peacebuilding initiatives in this and other conflicts.
A central premise of the thesis is that because current conflict resolution
approaches do not sufficiently account for the public political implications of
religion, they overlook some of the ways in which people act ethically and
morally to promote peace instead of conflict. Furthermore these approaches do
not sufficiently account for the ways in which religion informs people’s moral
context and their fluid moral identities. By exploring how religion informs and
shapes the moral imaginaries and the moral context in which individuals are
located, this thesis argues that it is possible to locate the ways in which both
religious and nonreligious individuals are motivated to act ethically out of love
rather than from need to promote the flourishing of others. It uncovers ways
that individuals, religious or not, deploy their moral imagination and how they
are changed by their encounters with their enemy. Additionally, this thesis
considers the intersections of religion and gender in the constructions of fluid
identities and seeks to uncover the moral agency of religious women,
something that the thesis argues has not been sufficiently considered in the
feminist conflict resolution literature in the Israel/Palestine conflict.